Just installed a new HP printer...how can they get away with making drivers this bad? Over 200MB just for a print/scan driver, and the 199MB not used for the drivers is all malware! It added 7 programs to my autorun...3 are for printer sharing (but they don't work unless windows printer sharing is enabled, and windows printer sharing does not need them, so they are clearly not what they seem to be). The fourth is an app that is nothing more than a link to HP's supplies selling website (this could be a few K, but HP wrote it so it takes up over 20MB of memory). The fifth was a yahoo toolbar...a toolbar that installed without my permission, and which launches pop-up adds and also blocks webpages with the ads that it places right over the text. The last two are for printing website (I can do that anyway!!!), and they do lots of little things like dissabling the scroll bars and preventing streaming pages from working.
HP...WTF? How can you justify adding 7 apps that have nothing to do with the printer at all, and which take up over 100MB of memory all together? Is this to try and sell new PCs when people think their system is slow because it is old? What happens when someone buys a top-of-the-line HP from you, only to find out that they still can't watch streaming video because they were dumb enough to buy one of your printers?
Oh, and 2 of the apps crash everytime I log out, presenting error messages...I don't think HP ever tested these drivers; if they had, they would have seen the errors. I guess they know better than to install HP software...they probably have an in-house driver package that they use (yes, I tried the "professionals only" driver pack, but it does not allow for use of the scanner).
I thought HP drivers were bad in the past, even terrible...the only 'Nice' thing I could say was, "At least it is better than iTunes"...I can't even say that anymore.
